Lemon Cucumber

Welcome to Weird Food Wednesday! 

It's not Wednesday, so I suppose it's a bit odd to introduce what I hope will become a weekly Wednesdays-only post about some weird foodie find or other (in an attempt to make myself write more and try new things) but I swear I have a perfectly good reason. Three reasons, actually. Yesterday (a real Wednesday), I was at an amusement park letting the thrill rides bang coherent use of the English language out of my head. I technically posted a weird find last Wednesday, so this isn't even the introduction. And umm, well, I didn't think of this until just now and weird finds just works better with Wednesdays. (I evidently haven't recovered from the thrill rides. I promise not to say the W-word again.)

So what counts as a weird find? With me, just about anything and everything is fair game to be classified as "weird," considering that I ate a HoHo, a common children's treat, for the first time on Monday. I promise it wasn't just any HoHo - the bakery annex of the Napa winery we visited called it the "Adult HoHo" and it took me a fork, knife and TWO sittings to polish off.

But I'm not here to talk about HoHos. This week's weird find is... drum roll please... the lemon cucumber. My sister Sandy and I found it at the Ferry Plaza Farmer's Market on Tuesday and truth be told, it is a fascinating little specimen, bizarre in look but totally familiar in flavor. It's about the size and approximate color of a lemon. The skin looks like a melon's and feels like an apple's - and that is exactly how you're supposed to eat it, like an apple. 

But the taste is a delicate twist on the common cuke: fresh, clean and mild with a hint of sweetness. The natural packaging just makes it the perfect hand-to-mouth snack. Sprinkle a little salt or maybe even a little sugar on the juicy flesh, or bite right in au natural. 

But be forewarned: it may induce a shimmy that Sandy dubbed "the lemon cucumber dance."